One of our members was asked recently, "How come, when I produce so much more today, my wages never rise? I work ever longer hours, even my wife now has to work and the cost of living always rises. Who is getting the gain from my extra work? And where will it all end? When will I get a life?"

This is why: as productivity rises, earned incomes, in the form of wages and interest, fall in proportion to unearned incomes, in the form of rent. Nearly all the gain goes to rent as the return to private owners of land. One of our members provides a good explanation for the phenomenon on his blog site here

The LibDems continue to thrash around with their idea for a "Mansions Tax". The original proposal was for it to start at a threshold of £1 million but that raised an uproar as it would have caught quite a lot of owners of ordinary houses in and around London, so the latest idea is for a threshold of £2 million, which will simply not raise enough money to be worth the trouble. The best of it is that at least it is a sign that the LibDems are moving away from their pet Local Income Tax proposal. But why don't they get a proper grip on the issue?

Here is an outline of what we would suggest the LibDems put in their manifesto instead, expressed in the kind of way that a doorstep canvasser could put across easily and convincingly.

The tax system locks people out of work and into poverty. How does it do this? There is no need to go into too many details. Just work out these figures and you will see the size of the barrier against work.

Useful ammunition for the LVT case can always be obtained from Tax Justice Network and Tax Research. But both have come under attack lately from the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, where there is anger about their activities. TJN is headed by John Christensen, and is a campaign against tax avoidance and tax havens. The website has the title "Tax havens cause poverty" - a questionable assertion.

An article in the Guardian today notes that there are an estimated 1m empty homes in the UK, and about 3,000 of them in the Central London borough of Westminster. Some of them, in Mayfair, are mansions are worth as much as £50m, even in their dilapidated state. Many of the biggest and most expensive are owned not by dusty old dowagers down on their luck but by mystery investors hiding their identities behind offshore companies.

That’s my home. Get your dirty tax hands off it

Homeowners instinctively hate a mansion tax. They feel their hard-earned bricks and mortar should be beyond the State. So wrote Matthew Parris in today's Times. The article is worth reading and so are the dozens of comments that follow,

Land distribution is not the answer to poverty. Is there really no Silver Bullet?, a new film by Fred Harrison which can be viewed on his Renegade Economist website, explains precisely why.